Sunday, November 11, 2007

Haven't seen coverage of this but the Wall Street Journal ran this last week about Basque, by Keith Johnson. (I assume no relation to the phonetician by that name.) Maybe linguists just don't read the WSJ?

The title, "Basque Inquisition" doesn't bode well, of course. Whether the assertive push for learning and using Basque in the region where it's traditionally been spoken is beyond what I can comment on — I'd be interested in hearing about how people see it compared to Quebec and other situations of linguistic minorities within national states.

But various parts of the article just don't make much sense. Like this: Basque "is an ancient language little suited to contemporary life." It's spoken by a ton of living people in Europe, which sort of suggest that it's not that ill-suited. And if Hebrew can be revived successfully .... . Anyhow, as a result of its antiquity:

Wow, really? Compared to most languages where these words go back a millennium or two? At least we in English have our own native words for this kind of stuff — not like we'd have to build or borrow things like science, democracy or independence from other languages! And maybe you can't do math in Basque:

While Indo-European languages have similar roots for basic words like numbers -- three, drei, tres, trois -- counting in Euskera bears no relation: bat, bi, hiru, lau, and up to hamar, or 10.

Mr. Johnson, you might want to check out Hungary, Finland, Estonia for their numerals.

Well, at least the WSJ did some corrections, e.g. that a pig herder is urdain, not artzain.

My husband speaks Basque to our 2 year old and their communication seems just fine. The reaction to this article in the Basque Country has been quite strong and many, many letters to the editor have been sent--though not printed. We'd love if Americans, especially linguists, would send comments as well. You now have to pay to read the article on wsj.com, but I can send you a copy if you're interested. The article is outragous, but it's not really worth it to tell small lies, is it? kristentherese@hotmail.com

I'm Spanish and my mother's family is Basque. No one in her family, for many generations, ever spoke Basque. Despite of what current polititians are trying to suggest, Basque was only spoken in villages until a few years ago, where it was imposed everywhere in the Basque Country. The more cultivated people from the cities (Bilbao, San Sebastian, Vitoria) always spoke Spanish. Furthermore, when the main language in most of Spain was Arabic (1,000 years ago), the main language in the Basque Country was already Spanish.Obviously most of the people writing this comments have lived in the Basque Country, because if you had, as my family and many close friends, you would agree 100% with Mr. Johnson's article.